Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1887-09-16
THE NEW ONION PEST.

A Middletown On. V dispatch to the
sons the great onion-growing district ly-
ing along the Waikiki river and its tribu-
taries in Sussex county, New Jersey, and
Orange county, New York, yields a crop
of more than 600, 900 bushels. The roo
is here cultivated most successfully in the
black dirt meadows, which are stretches
of swampy lowlands that have been
ditched and reclaimed from the dominion
develop the favorable conditions of a
clean and easily titled soil. The crops
formerly produced on these meadows were
so large and profitable that the black dirt
lands readily sold at $500 to 5000 an acre
or fully quadruple the prices current for
choice tracts of upland Immediately adj
joining.
Formerly the onion growers only for
midable insect enemy was the common
cut worm. But at the opening of the
growing season two years ago a new and
most destructive pest made its appear
ance simultaneously in all of the onion
fields of the Orange and Sussex district.
The new enemy first appears in an active
form as a small black fly and the female
lays her eggs on the tender shoots of the
young onion. In afew days a tiny white
grub is Matched, which proceeds to bore
into and feed upon the bulb of the onion,
killing the plant. Having fulfilled its
mission in the grub form, the worm leaves
the decayed onion for a refuge in the soil
near by, where its skin hardens and it
takes the pupa condition, and this in turn
gives birth to the fly. The process of
development from the deposition of the
egg to the appearance of the perfect fly
is so rapid that three or four devastating
broods are generated during one season.
EntomOlogists attached to the depart
ment of agriculture at Washington, who
visited the onion district last season to
investigate the new pest, pronounced it to
be an insect imported from Europe,
scientifically named AnthOmyia C~eparum.
1t is commonly known as the onion fly or
onion weevil, and Its ravages last season
and again this season have proved most
disastrous to the crops. The remedies
suggested of spraying the young plants
with salt water or lye, to destroy the eggs
of the fly, have proved only partially sue
cessfully.
The onion growers will gather this
season not more than half "a crop. In
many cases, more particularly on the
Greycourt meadows, in this county, which
were once the chief seat of the industry,
the cultivation of the root has peer large
" abandoned and the fields devoted to
corn or potatoes. AS a result of the raw
ages of the new pest, there is a diminish
ed acreage and a diminished yield pei
acre.
The consequent depreciation in the
values of the black dirt onion lands is
very great, and to some owners ruinous
AS an example, six and one-half acres in
the heart of the Greycourt meadows, al
/ a sale under foreclosure of mortgage re
Gently, brought only 81, 900, as againsI
| sales formerly of no better lands adjoin
ing at $500 and 5000 IN acre. 1t looks as
if onion growing in the black dirt region
will have to be abandoned. The Northern
= markets, however, will obtain an abund
+ ant supply from the sandy fields of south
| ern New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia
which are as yet exempt from the raw
e ages of the new pest.
d Peach festivals in some of the %countr.